Enjoyment without
Attachment
Buddhistdoor Global | 2016-02-19 |
For many, enjoyment is the primary objective in
life. Modern advances in science, technology, and medicine mean
that the fortunate among us no longer need to focus on brute
survival, leaving us with more time and energy to enjoy such things
as art, music, travel, food, the company of friends, and the
pursuit of fun. The humanist refrain has long been to deny no one
their pleasures as long as those pleasures do nothing to harm
others.
Buddhism is seen in popular culture (and even by
other religions) to be ambivalent on the experience of enjoyment.
Our masters rightly teach that we should be moderate and mindful in
our consumption of the things we like. However, somewhere down the
line, enjoyment began to be confused with a never-ending attachment
to sensual pleasures, one of the four forms
of upadana (along with
attachment to wrong views, rites and rituals, and self-doctrine).
It is unclear when this conflation took place, or how Buddhism
might have been misunderstood to teach that the two go hand in
hand.
What we do know is that the idea of enjoyment and
attachment as inseparable is widely touted in today’s pop culture.
“I can’t get enough,” brays the rapper, “I can’t live without you,”
croons the boy band to an imaginary lover. In popular culture, if
you aren’t burning with desire for something, you’re not really
enjoying it. Unfortunately, the inevitable result of all this
attachment is dissatisfaction, or suffering—in
Sanskrit, duhkha—according to the
Buddha, one of the three characteristics of existence.
So is enjoyment without attachment even possible?
There is no question that attachment should be skillfully avoided.
Yet if we accept the premise that pleasure can’t be had without
feeling attachment, we have no choice but to accept that we should
deny ourselves enjoyment as well. This paints a rather bleak and
impoverished picture of life that condemns everyone to an ascetic
existence—which, by the Buddha’s own definition, is one of the
lifestyle extremes, the other being the indulgences of
hedonism.
But it is not enjoyment that leads to suffering; the
attachment to a pleasant phenomenon or sensation stems from
ignorance. We suffer because attachment seeks to freeze an
ever-changing reality and our expectations are simply dissonant
projections of how we want things to be onto how things really are.
Cultivating non-attachment, by contrast, helps us to be more open
and accepting, whether an experience is pleasurable, or even if it
is painful. Given the right spiritual practice and contemplations,
enjoying things without becoming attached to them can bring forth
greater inner strength than obdurate self-denial.
Contemplation of emptiness, or the selflessness of
phenomena (Skt. anatman—another of the
characteristics of existence in Buddhism), is one of the best tools
to help us practice enjoyment without attachment. According to
Buddhism, whatever we enjoy is empty of inherent characteristics.
As real as it feels and as much as we like it, we can fully
appreciate it even without actually believing in it. It is akin to
appreciating a well-crafted film while knowing the protagonists and
worlds to be fictional. Someone who takes fiction too seriously and
really believes in Luke Skywalker or Bilbo Baggins—and this can end
in tragedy—we would consider “deluded.” In Buddhism, to attach
reality to the things we find pleasurable is to buy into similar
delusion.
Meditating on impermanence—in
Sanskrit, anitya, the third
characteristic—has long been a cornerstone of Buddhist
contemplation. In the scheme of things a human life is all too
brief, and a happy event like a dinner with friends or a beautiful
day, even shorter. As tiresome as the cliché might be, things are
precious
precisely because they
do not last. Without breaks and a final note, a piece of music
would soon be annoying; without a resolution, a novel would be
meaningless. Enjoyment should therefore be about treasuring a
moment or another person’s life because those, too, by their very
nature are finite.
Impermanence also lends attachment a temporal
dimension. We have all felt nostalgic for a past event, a
lifestyle, or a place we have enjoyed, but we recognize this as
sentimentality that is best not indulged. How often have we tried
to revisit something that holds fond memories—an old flame or a
place we went as a child—only to be disappointed to find that
things have changed, or were never quite the way we
remembered?
The very process of longing exacerbates the pain.
Hankering for something past can turn the real enjoyment of the
experience into a painful nuisance for weeks, months, or years,
perhaps even more so when we can never go back. Buddhist teachers
often talk about accepting unhappy moments and learning to let them
go, but we should also do the same for pleasurable occasions.
Enjoyment need not be tied to attachment if it is experienced with
awareness—a lucid understanding of the illusory and impermanent
nature of all things.
The monastic poets of Japan, such as Ikkyu
(1394–1481) and Ryokan (1758–1831), are celebrated for their
ruminations on the nature of impermanence. Their writing combines
tenderness regarding the enjoyment of nature and human emotion with
a deeply Buddhist acceptance of its inherent transience. In one
poem, Ikkyu writes of the common motif of the cherry blossom,
juxtaposing the renewal of its color and fragrance each spring with
the loss of the individual blossoms. After a smallpox epidemic,
Ryokan likens the permanent departure of the children who have died
to the previous autumn’s leaves, which he contrasts with the
cyclically blooming flowers of spring. Perhaps the lesson to be
learned from these poets is that, as well as meditating on
emptiness and impermanence, we have to learn to appreciate life for
ourselves, and sometimes in raw and reflective ways. Far from being
a trivial pursuit, the attempt to understand how to better enjoy
one’s life is a measure of spiritual maturity.